In the process of working on "Patriots Act: Voices of Dissent, an Oral History," I have spent the past year interviewing federal whistle-blowers, peace activists, environmentalists, politicians, journalists and even a former special assistant to the president for combatting terrorism. Some risked careers, others prison by taking a personal stand on issues that deeply mattered to them. Their actions embody what is best about our national character. They repudiated the false suffocating claims by those who have hijacked American democracy through gross distortion and partisan misrepresentation. Despite being among our nation's true patriots, these dissenters were often labeled "un-American" by their opponents and detractors.

Our country, after all, was built on the brawny shoulders of protest. Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, of California's Army National Guard is a textbook example of what happens to a soldier who complains to the media: His military superiors will punish him; fearing retaliation, fellow soldiers will snub him. I first interviewed Dominguez in December. He had been recently quoted by name in a Los Angeles Times report that detailed training, morale and equipment problems of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment, headquartered in Modesto, which represents one-sixth of the state's National Guard. The battalion was preparing for deployment to Iraq and was temporarily stationed at a training base near Fort Bliss, Texas.

"Some of us are going to die (in Iraq), and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," Dominguez told reporter Scott Gold. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country." In civilian life, Dominguez is vice president at a mortgage bank. He's a Republican, married, and has a daughter and young son, Reagan, named after the former president.

The military's suffer-in-silence culture discourages publicly airing its dirty laundry. Not surprisingly, Dominguez's battalion superiors came down hard on him after the unwanted publicity. Dominguez, a veteran of 15 years in the Guard and Marine Reserves, is now back home with his family. He never made it into Iraq. While in Kuwait, he developed a potentially fatal medical condition and was evacuated to Germany on a hospital plane. These days, when speaking to Dominguez, you immediately detect a resigned weariness in his voice. This formerly gung-ho squad leader is sad, depressed, can't sleep -- an indirect consequence of trying to tell the truth publicly about the Guard because he wanted to save lives on the battlefield.

What follows are excerpts from my interviews with Dominguez that took place over the span of eight months:

I decided to speak out because it's the difference between life or death. I'm very in touch with my mortality. It's the difference of being prepared and not being prepared. At 45, I don't feel like bullets can bounce off my chest anymore like I did when I was 18, 19. That's why the military really loves the teenagers who think that nothing bad can happen to them.

The quality of the training was so poor and so pathetic. But do you know how much money we wasted in this dumb boot-camp environment? Mexico has better equipment, and in certain instances, our Humvees were worse than the Mexican army's. They were breaking down all the time.

Everybody complains, but nobody can do or does anything. I mean, they complain to the chain of command, but the chain of command really doesn't care; they just want to make their rank or get the next star. I just realized how cruel it really is when you just become another body to be thrown into the grinder. But I was responsible for nine men in my squad as their squad leader. I made commitments to them and to most of their mothers and fathers that I would bring them back home from Iraq in one piece."

The military's response

The base's upper command accused me of endangering the military and possibly aiding the enemy. I was told by the public affairs officer that the Times article would probably be grabbed on by al Qaeda and Al-Jazeera, and that we would be shown that we don't want to fight. That just cannot be further from the truth.

After the article came out, a phone call was made to my wife that was threatening in nature. The person -- it was a woman who was a family support coordinator for our company -- had called on behalf of my first sergeant. She said there would be retaliation from "up." I lost command of my squad and my men.

However, I was told that I was going to be given another squad in a different company, but that never happened. The lieutenant colonel -- our battalion commander -- said to us at one of our formations that by speaking to the press, the only thing that I achieved was that we would be labeled whiners and complainers. Instead of going out on patrols and doing infantry stuff, we would probably be relegated to doing security-guard-type duty. He was blaming me. It's better to blow up the insurgents than to be blown up. I was made the scapegoat for an entire company of over 600 men.

Some of them stopped talking to me. Several of them would give me the evil eye. Some of the men who understood the reasons behind what I had said felt intimidated because they saw what was happening to me publicly. So they immediately quieted down. These are kids.

On Dec. 19, after we had a final formation prior to us being released to come home for the holiday season, the lieutenant colonel ordered the entire battalion to fall out of formation and gather around him in a quasi-organized formation. He said to all of us, "Well, you know, you guys can go ahead, when you go home and speak to the f -- media, it won't make any difference. You want to call the media? You want to give interviews? Go ahead! Has anything better happened? Has anything changed since you spoke to the media? Not a goddamn thing! Is anything going to change? You better f -- believe it's not! The only thing that we got out of this was silk panties."

What happened is we had been issued additional uniforms and we were issued long johns made out of synthetic material called Polartec and so he attributed that to my going to the media as the reason for us receiving this additional gear."

Kuwait

After arriving in Kuwait, we trained at Camp Buehring for another two weeks before going over the berm into Iraq. I still didn't have my gear, not even a weapon. I was given basically menial tasks to perform. I really didn't have a job. I was not given any particular duties which would be commensurate to my rank as a staff sergeant. I was soon transferred to brigade headquarters. I was finally issued a weapon. The entire time I was there, I fired six bullets from my M4 carbine and that was the extent of my training in Kuwait. That's how many bullets it took for me to hit the target, also known as zeroing your weapon.

We never received the armored Humvees either. What we were given are what's known throughout the army as Mad Max armor and, basically, they are these ill-fitting rusting steel plates that we were required to install on our vehicles. They afford you limited protection against small arms fire, meaning bullets -- small caliber bullets -- but they will not protect you against IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. They will not protect you against any RPGs (rocket-powered grenades). On the floorboards, we were given a directive to just put sandbags. Those things are just a stopgap measure to sort of deflect an explosion in the event that you run over a mine or some other form of explosive device.

Illness strikes

I don't know if it was stress, but one day I was resting in my cot when I began to get chest pains. I went to the medic, and they found that I was having an irregular heartbeat, so they ended up evacuating me on a C-17 hospital plane to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

In Germany they did a battery of tests and decided that I had an irregular heartbeat due to post-traumatic stress disorder, and so from there they evacuated me to Walter Reed Hospital in the United States, and then I was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, where they told me that I was going to be stationed for the duration of my deployment on medical hold status, unless I refused medical treatment in which case they would send me home.

I refused medical treatment by the Army. I was processed out and given a separation -- not a discharge -- from active duty. I came home April 30 and returned to work -- my civilian work as a loan officer.

Ducking monsters

I still have an irregular heartbeat. It comes and goes. I could be sitting around or lying down, then all of a sudden, my heart begins to flutter. I'll start sweating profusely, and sometimes I get a feeling of claustrophobia. I never had any symptoms like this before in my life. I used to run 100 miles a month. I cannot sleep. I'm up until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. I have to take medication to put myself to sleep. Doctors gave me a drug called Ambien.

I can't get these injured young men I saw on the hospital planes out of my mind. I saw horrible, devastating things on my flights back from Kuwait to Germany and then to the United States. I saw guys who were missing limbs. All the catastrophic injuries were due to IEDs, or improvised explosive devices. I saw a young man from my flight back to the United States with everything basically gone from his nose all the way down to his throat. All gone.

I'm in contact with one sergeant from my old unit. They're based south of Baghdad at Camp Falcon. Three days after they arrived in-country, a taxicab packed with explosives was parked on a road, and as my unit was driving by, the insurgents detonated it. A young man by the name of Cpl. Watkins, who was part of Operation Iraqi Freedom back in March 2003, was killed. I knew him personally. He was in his late 20s. I felt anger, a sense of uselessness, powerlessness. I wanted to fly to Iraq to be with my men. But that's only a fantasy.

My wife, Erlisa, is having a hard time. She's very supportive of what I did. She believes 100 percent in my having come forward and having stated the facts to the media. She was worried that someone would put a bullet in my back over in Iraq.

I'm not the same man that I used to be. I know I will struggle with this depression until my men come back from Iraq. I don't think that my mind will rest, and I don't even know if I will ever be able to rest. I don't have to duck bullets, but I'm ducking my own monsters. I'm a man of conviction. If I had to do it all over, given the same circumstances, and knowing ahead of time what I've been through, I would do it again.

The army says that they encourage freedom of speech. I disagree. There is no freedom of speech in the military. I have paid the ultimate price for speaking out.

Epilogue

Recently, Dominguez's old battalion has been back in the news. Gold, the same Los Angeles Times reporter who was the author of the original Guard stories, wrote that military authorities in Iraq had relieved battalion commander Lt. Col. Patrick Frey from duty, due in part to allegations of widespread misconduct by soldiers under his command. Charges included prisoner abuse and extortion of local merchants.

Dominguez puts the blame on the Guard's senior leadership and what he sees as their penchant for cover-up, damage control and blaming lower-ranking soldiers. "If this was happening in the United States Marine Corps," he said, "heads would roll from top to bottom, no questions asked. Period."